of you have already met us out at the table, but I have my wife stand up so that you can
see her and my wife Sherry. We just celebrated our 30th anniversary on Monday, and so we're
off to a good start. So the first 30 has been good. We're working on the second one now.
We have seven kids. There's three already out of the house, grown, one of whom is married,
two of whom are married, and then the other four are back in the various places where
they're supposed to be tonight we trust. So we know that you have some of our prayer cards
out on the hallway. We have a table out there in the front that has some as well. We also
have some things there. If they can be of help to you, we have some Russian tracks. And we
also, in case you don't speak Russian yourself, we have the English translation of it so you
can see what it is. And before you hand it to somebody, we also have some little business
cards which are not ours, but it's a ministry that our church in Russia supports where they
have an online radio station, Christian radio station 24-7 that broadcasts both in Russian
and in Chinese, in Japanese and in Korean, in German and in French and in Spanish. And
so if there are people that you think you have difficulty reaching because of a language
barrier, obviously we don't want that to be a barrier. And so that's one avenue that's
available. And certainly if you have people from other nationalities or language groups
that you have difficulty communicating with, we can always get a hold of tracks and things
like that. And you can give somebody the gospel if you really want to. So we want to encourage
people to do that. It's been really exciting to meet with the Jennings before the service
and hear about the way that the Lord is moving and multiplying in the church here. And that's
very exciting. We know that there are some folks that are here that were not here the
last time that we were here. And so our presentation, it kind of gives a whole overview of the time
that we spent both in Russia and then now the ministry that the Lord has given to us
in New York City. And so we'll go ahead and begin that. That'll be a good way hopefully
to answer a lot of the questions that you may have and for you to see what's going on as
well as maybe it'll spark some questions. So if you have any questions for us, we don't
have any other plans tonight. So after the service lets out, we can meet you back to
the table and we'll be happy to answer your questions. And if we can provide you, like
I said, with any kind of other information that would be beneficial, some gospel materials
or something, then we'd be happy to do that. Okay. So what I've done to try to make sure
I don't ramble is I actually have kind of a written out script here that I'll more or
less stick with, but at the same time I may diverge from that every once in a while. So
I am the switch on the side. Okay. Now I'm armed and dangerous. No, I think I just switched
it off. Okay. Okay. I recognize that. Okay. So we serve the Lord as you already know in
New York City, but we never expected to. I was born in Cincinnati, but my family is actually
from Kentucky. We moved there when I was six months old and that's where I grew up at,
a small town named Somerset. If you, if you boat at all, go down to Lake Cumberland, you've
probably probably been in Somerset. That's home for me. A little town of about 12,000
people and my wife is from Illinois, not from Chicago or a big metro area, but from farm
country. And so she was saved when she was nine. I was saved at the age of 12 in Bible
College where we met the Lord had burdened my heart for Uzbekistan, which at the time
was part of the Soviet Union. But when the door to that country did not open to us, our
mission board asked us to consider Siberia, Russia, 2,800 miles to the east. And so we
could at the time, we could see a path that led from Siberia through some friends of friends
back to Uzbekistan. So we thought, sure, that'd be great. So we went to the city of
Blagov Yashinsk, which actually means the city of good news, not because it's a gospel
saturated place, but that's what the Russians called it way back when when they took it
away from the Chinese. So the city of good news, that's where we were. It's in the Russian
Far East. There's a map here. If you can see that little red dot way off on the right side
of your screen, the best way to find it is if you find the Korean Peninsula on a map
and you go straight north through China, right to the Russian Chinese border, that's where
you find Blagov Yashinsk. So it's about 7,000 miles east of Moscow, only about 700 miles
off of the Pacific Ocean. So it's not anywhere close to the European part of the country.
It's right on the border with China, like I said, the Amur is what the Russians call
it, the Black Dragon River is what it translates to in Chinese. Our first visa was a cultural
exchange visa, and so I taught English to elementary and high school students here at
school number five during our first year in Russia. We were in Blagov Yashinsk for about
a year and a half, and then we moved 25 miles outside of town to this village named Ivanovka.
And there we began, this is a postcard of our village. It says Ivanovka, Lubimelysilo,
our beloved village. So that's where we were at, and we began having services in our home
and outside of our home in an outbuilding on our property and outside underneath some
canvas that we stretched up to give ourselves some cover from the sun. So we saw people
get saved, get baptized, but the government was being influenced by the Russian Orthodox
Church. This is the guy, Gabriel, who was the priest in our area, and so as a result,
through God's providence, we were forced to leave the country back in 2003. But during
our ministry in Russia, the Lord had been arranging for our next field of service, but
it wasn't in Uzbekistan. Instead, he connected us with Pastor Jim Bicklin, his wife, Nancy,
with whom we now serve in New York City. Why New York City? Well, I'm going to tell you,
and that is when we went to Russia even, the burden that the Lord put on our hearts was
not for the big metro areas like Moscow or St. Petersburg, but it was for smaller rural
areas. And so being from a small area myself, my wife as well, that's just how we were
wired. But so when we got back to the states after getting kicked out of Russia, we expected
the Lord to put us in another part of the former Soviet Union, but it didn't work out
that way. So why New York City? Well, you already know that a lot of people live there. There's
about 9 million in the city and about 20 million in the metro area. And you also know that
they have come from all over the world. But what you might, okay, so in addition to that,
there's an extra 50 million people or so that come to visit the city every year, you know,
passing through their students, their tourists, their business people, their visiting relatives,
whatever the reason is, but there's just a lot of, there's a wave of humanity that
keeps washing in and washing out and it's always changing. So you know all that stuff.
What you might not know exactly is that New York City is home to the largest Russian speaking
community in the world outside of the former Soviet Union. Over 600,000 Russian speaking
people live in New York City. To put that in perspective, that's the same number of people
as live here in Findlay, and in Bowling Green, and all of Wood County, and in Toledo, and
all of Lucas County put together. That's 600,000 people. And that's the size of the Russian
speaking community in New York City. With a community that large, many people feel no
need to learn English because they can live quite comfortably just speaking their native
tongue. So although my wife does have an ESL group which meets on Sunday afternoons after
our service, we conduct all of our church services in the Russian language so that they
can all have access to the gospel. This is a hodgepodge. The various ethnic groups, and
there are over 150 separate ethnic groups that were part of the former Soviet Union. People
from every shade and every series of facial features, anybody really. If they couldn't
be Russian, Russian, but they could be part of the Soviet Union. So with a community,
okay anyway. So the various ethnic groups, and this is just a smattering of them, that
inhabit the Russian Federation and its former satellite republics, they embrace various
religions and various beliefs. There are the atheists represented by their number one flag
bearer here, Vladimir Lenin. And you also have what perhaps you didn't realize, Russia
has the largest Muslim population in all of Europe. There's almost 2 million Muslims
that live just in Moscow. And that's not including, of course, the Central Asian countries like
Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and the others that used to be part of the Soviet Union. But the
predominant religion in the Russian Federation is still the Russian Orthodox Church. And
Poles show that between 60 and 70% of the population consider themselves Russian Orthodox.
Russian Orthodox is a lot like Roman Catholicism. It's very ritualistic. It's very elaborate
in their services. And of course, a lot of these folks, like in any religion anywhere,
a lot of the folks who would identify as Russian Orthodox, they're not really religious at
all. They just figured, hey, I'm born in Russia, that means I'm Russian Orthodox, right? And
so for a lot of them, it's cultural, you know? They don't really go to church. They don't
really do anything religious at all. They just claim, well, I'm not an atheist, so what
am I? Oh, I'm Russian Orthodox. Okay. So a lot of it is that way. And so the dominant
in the Russian Federation is Russian Orthodoxy. But while all of these different groups are
of course present in our community, the majority of Russian speaking people in New York are
Jewish. Most of them are not ultra Orthodox like these guys. Many of them are not very
observant at all. Maybe Hanukkah, maybe Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement, you know, the
two high holy days. But they have been taught that Jesus is not for them. And for some of
them, that's all they know. Oh, you're a Christian? I'm not. I'm Jewish, which is completely
backwards of how it's supposed to be. But Jesus Christ, we know, is for the Jew and
for the Gentile. He's the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. This fellow,
Ben Stein, he was our brother from Kiev, Ukraine. He came to him years ago, was born again.
He was a bold witness for Christ. And he was like my right hand for many years. But the
Lord took him home back in January. This is another shot. You've got Babur on your left.
Yeah, he's from Uzbekistan. He got saved after a Bible study in New York City and then in
the center of Barjah from Kazakhstan. He was saved after one of our Bible studies in another
part of the city. And the list goes on. Folks who have come to know the Lord or who serve
alongside him in our, serve alongside us in some capacity. This family, the guy, the dad,
he's peace, he'll be, he'll be speaking tonight or tomorrow in my absence, our midweeks on
Thursday. In the center, his son runs our website. His other son, the tall fellow, he
runs our live stream. His daughter-in-law, who's there next to him, Katya, she does some
translated from time to time. His wife does decorating and visiting. And they're just
super folks. So you have people who are like any church. They're preaching. They're teaching.
They're doing our electrical stuff. They're translating. They're doing music, maintenance,
and cooking and decorating and evangelizing and counseling. And then this is a family,
a young family. He actually runs our live stream on Sunday mornings. He and his wife,
they have a Bible study in their home every two weeks. And so that's been going on for
about four months. And so we're really excited to see what the Lord's doing with them. So
if Ben was my right hand, this lady, Olia, she was my wife's right hand. She went back
to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan last fall. Many of our folks are very mobile. They've
already come across an ocean to get here. And so they have no problem moving someplace else
in the country if they think they're going to get a job or if they think there's going
to be some kind of better opportunity for them. I mean, I can name, like, this is a
family from Ukraine. They're in Cleveland now. But I can name nine different states
in five different countries where people from our church now can be found. And so it's
kind of like, in a way, it's kind of like a military church in the sense that people
come in, some of them stick and some of them, it's just a way station and they're off to
wherever the next place is. So now we have this other Olia. She's from Belarus and her
very active boys that kind of try to fill up the space that our previous Olia left.
And this introduces to us as well the things that our family does. So our kids are all
involved, both working in Sunday school or other times. Our daughter Shostya, she's our
church pianist and she also does some other things from time to time. We also have, all
of our kids are active, passing out tracks, both in a public way and also privately.
Our son Gabriel, he was trying to get the gospel, all of his little league teammates,
our girls also are really interested in preparing baked goods to feed the body and the soul of
our local police precinct. And so we visit them pretty frequently. And so this is where
we're at. If you come to Brooklyn, Southern Brooklyn where the church is, this is where
you'll find us. We've got four storefronts. The building itself has five storefronts on
the bottom and some apartments on top which we're not connected with. So we've got two
storefronts, a Chinese restaurant and then two storefronts. And so that's the facility
that we rent. What you have is you have on the right side of the building, these two
storefronts, you can see the pillar in the middle has been opened up to form the auditorium
that the English church that we work with, Pastor Bickles church, where they normally
meet. We meet there on Thursdays. This is actually a Thanksgiving service that we had
because our midweek is Thursday. That's when we can use the building. And so that's that's
that side of the building. And then the other side of the building, we have our Russian
auditorium. And then the fourth storefront is three classrooms and a nursery. And so
this is this is our congregation different different times. Half a block away from us
is this building. It's an old. It's an unfinished, Episcopal owned building. You can see it's
three stories. It's got a basement. It's got land, which we you know, we don't have any
parking. You saw there's no parking in front of our building. So you just have to scatter
in the neighborhood and find what you can find. So we've been trying to talk we have
been talking to the to the diocese for three and a half years, trying to gain access to
the building to help them to finish it to share the space to buy it outright to have
God give it to us, whatever, whatever any or all of those things that we can do so that
we can have more space so that we can do more things. So we ask you to pray for us about
that that the Lord would open up a place that would that would allow us to expand in in
different ways. So here's a map of Long Island. You also have the New York City is on there
the different different colored stuff. Our church in Brooklyn is located at the red dot
in the orange blob. The orange blob is Brooklyn. So the red dot if you can see it is way at
the south. We also have a Bible study to your right in that lime green area. That's Queens,
you know, New York has five boroughs Queens in Brooklyn, the Bronx, that Nile and then
of course Manhattan. So our church is in Brooklyn. We have a weekly Bible study in Queens. What
you can't see by looking at this map is that it takes our folks if they wanted to it would
take them two and a half hours on the train to get from that dot in Queens to that dot
in Brooklyn. And so that's why we have a Bible study in Queens. And that's why we'd like to
open up another one somewhere else two and a half hours. What does that mean? That means
you get in your car here at Trinity and you can be in Flint, Michigan sooner than some
of our folks can get from one of our locations to the other one. Two and a half hours. And
that's just in New York. And that's not even as far as one part of New York is from the
other part of New York. Right? That's just it's Sunday. Trains don't run as frequently.
There's wider gaps in between. There's no direct route. You have to go up here and then
you have to go down here. That's how it is. So that's something else we ask you to pray
for that the Lord would give us more locations that we could use so that we could expand.
We're actually trying right now to we're looking for a spot in Long Island. We've out of the
five boroughs even. We found three spots on Long Island that have both a Russian Orthodox
church and a Ukrainian Catholic church. And so we know there are people there and we know
that they're going to church of some kind there. And so we're trying to break into one
of those areas as well. So this is our Bible study in Queens on Monday nights. That's a
weekly thing. And so what we have finally, well, we've talked about the people in the
church. We've talked about our own family, my own family of the various members that
do different things. The third part of the triangle are churches like this. You guys
have been supporting us for a long time. We have different groups that come from time
to time to work with us, senior class trips, youth groups, senior citizens. We've had senior
citizen groups before. And so we can we can tailor any kind of group, any kind of size
for the most part. We have anyway, we had one group from Michigan, for example, that
spent about a week with us and they wanted to spend one day in a Chinese area, one day
in a Russian area, one day in an African area. We can do that in New York. You know, there's
everybody from everywhere, maybe not in the in the quantity that, for example, the Italians
or the Chinese or the Russians possess. But you can find neighborhoods of just about anybody
that you're looking for. So it's a great way to go to the mission field without needing
a passport, without needing an airplane ticket to visit another part of the world. Okay,
so that being said, there is a world of opportunity. And there's a limited time that God has given
to us to use. And so our goal was to plant churches and nurture them until the Lord provides
a national pastor to take them over and then move on to wherever the next place is that
the Lord would have us to go. So we do ask you to pray for us. This is our prayer card.
You can, like I said, find them on the table or in the hallway. Ask that the Lord be glorified
through us amongst the Russian speaking peoples of New York City. And that's our presentation.
Can I ask you to answer a question or two? Sure.
Sure. You talked about how that you thought you were going to be in Russia, basically
for the rest of your ministry, and somehow you got to New York City. Can you give them
a little of the story that you gave us? We are not. We're not on live streams. So this
is very private. Okay. So tell them about that. Okay. So we were in our village and thing,
you saw just a few pictures there of that because that was 20 years ago, almost. But
we had kids that were coming just out of the woodwork. It was great. And as a result, the
Orthodox Church was involved because they were losing people and influence, et cetera.
So they engineered for us to be removed from the country. So we had been working with another
missionary family and a single missionary lady there in Siberia. The lady had come back
here and she was actually supported by the church in New York that we now partner with.
And so we had been sending updates back to our supporting churches as different events
unfolded. And then she was also mirroring those and sending information to her supporting
churches because our ministries were very much connected. And so she contacted us and
she said, if you get kicked out of the country, then call me when you get back to the states
because there's something that I think the Lord would want me to tell you in that case.
And so we did. We got kicked out of the country, came back here to the states, called our friend
Margaret and Margaret told us about the Russian population, the fact that she had a supporting
church that was in Brooklyn who had been and the pastor had been wanting to establish a
Russian speaking church, which is what we have. He tried to bring in a couple of other
Russian speaking or Ukrainian speaking pastors from abroad that hadn't worked out because
of visa issues or whatever. And so they wanted to do more than just pass out tracks or have
that kind of ministry to the population. So right away, my wife and I, much to our surprise,
we both thought this is okay, this is what God wants us to do, which was a total shocker.
We're thinking we're headed back to Siberia and instead we're going to New Yorkistan or
New Yorker grad or something like that. So we made arrangements to come visit the church.
We were going to visit them in September or so. This was April. We got kicked out right
before Easter in 03. And so we were going to visit them when we were on our way up to
visit some of our other supporting churches in New England. But I didn't want to wait
that long. And so I called them up and asked if we could come early, like in July. And so
we did. Went to July. He already had a few Russian speaking people in his church. And
so we met with them, visited some others in the neighborhood, saw what there was to see,
at least a little sliver of it anyway. And we were convinced that the Lord wanted us there.
So we were actually with them on a Wednesday night with the pastor and his wife. And we
were driving around and they pulled off to the side of the road. And he turned around
and said, okay, well, what do you think? And so I told them that if they would have us,
then we would come work with them. And so they felt the same way. We, I thought, even
if our connection with Bethel, the church there wouldn't work out, okay, God still wanted
us in New York City to do what we're doing now. And so that's kind of the short version
of how that came about.
I don't know if you've ever been there. I don't know if you've ever been there. I don't know
if you've ever been there.
Sure. What I told pastor and his wife is that we found that ministry or that life in Russia
was hard because when we were in the village, we had sporadic electricity, no running water,
etc. So it takes a while to live, to clean, to cook, to all that kind of stuff. But we
told them life was hard, but ministry was easy because the people would come and they
would sit and we would talk and it was just different. You come to New York and you have
a different breed of Russians. Not everybody who wants to come comes. Not everybody who
wants to come is able to come. God allows some to come and doesn't allow others to come
and others don't want to come. And in New York, obviously it's not the cheapest place
in the world to live. And so you have these folks who are coming to this new country, maybe
where they were, they were doctors, they were bankers, they were professionals, they come
here and now they're Uber drivers or now they're construction workers. Most of our ladies, they
work as home health aides either for watching young children or else watching the elderly.
And so it's definitely a transition. So they have not only their own living expenses and
their own immigration court expenses, which immigrates to America if you do it the right
way, it can be sometimes a 10-year long process. It can take a long time and there are lawyers
every step of the way. So they are working and they are immigrating and oftentimes they're
trying to learn English as well. And then they still have whatever family back in the old
country, oftentimes they're the primary breadwinner. Sometimes the only breadwinner. They're not
making anything back there. And so they're being split in lots of different directions.
And so the folks that we do have, although we have, we have two services a week in Brooklyn.
I used to have three. And then the Bible study in Queens. Typically we only see our folks
once a week because schedule-wise they just, they can't come. They won't come. They're
working six days a week. Sometimes they're working eight days a week, it seems like.
You know, multiple jobs and the jobs they get are not the best jobs. And so, so yeah,
in New York, of course, life is pretty easy, but the ministry is much different because
of all the pressures and the hustle and the bustle that they're being pulled in.
You're at New York, there's 600,000, I said, in New York total, there's 600,000 Russian
people, Russian-speaking people. How many? I'm not even asking Baptist churches. I'm
just going to broaden a little bit and say Bible preaching. Gospel preaching as from
And the largest church?
A hundred people, maybe?
A hundred?
So, all the same size, that's 500 people, 500 people total with 600,000 people.
Do we need more churches there?
We do.
We need more Russians being churches there.
We do.
And our church, I'll say this, we have a sign in our church, obviously there's a war going on, right?
And our church is not a Russian church, it's not a Ukrainian church, it's not even a Slavic church,
because we want anyone who can speak Russian, especially from Central Asia,
since that was the original burden that the Lord put on our heart and continues, actually to have on our heart.
And so, we emphasize that, that there's one God, there's one faith, there's one brotherhood is what we have on our sign.
And we've lost people over the war.
We know, you know, family where the husband is Russian, the wife is Ukrainian,
but the husband supports the Ukrainians and the wife supports Vladimir Putin and the Russians.
And it is every kind of mixed up.
It is really very close to a civil war, and in some families it actually is that.
They've got people on both sides of the front.
So, yeah, we have, and we emphasize this, we have a Russian speaking church.
We're going to pray.
I would like to give you guys a comment to pray at least for the next couple of weeks for two things you guys for prayer.
Can anybody talk a little bit about the two things you guys for prayer for in their ministry?
Anybody?
Miss Karen?
More locations.
Did you guys catch that?
To pray that they would have more locations.
I'm so glad for fending traffic, where you can get just about anywhere in 15 minutes in town.
From the furthest side.
So to go two and a half hours, they need more locations.
We need more churches there, so let's pray for that.
Number one, what was the second thing?
Anybody remember?
That Episcopal church that isn't doing anything in that location, we need to pray that you guys make that location,
that it doesn't cost you too much.
Amen?
I know somebody who has a lot of money.
Amen.
Let's do this real quick.
You
For me, for my wife, yes sir?
It's real.
It's kind of a new development.
I mentioned to somebody, I think a lot of folks still have the idea of New York from the 70s,
where you see trash barrels burning and things like that, and it's not that way.
Mayor Giuliani cleaned that up before we ever got there, for the most part.
But there has been, in more recent days, a wave, a spate, of just random crimes on the subways,
people shooting people, knife and people stealing things.
Now I'll say this, nowadays, there's no part of New York City that I wouldn't feel comfortable and safe going in
the daytime hours, so it's not like a war zone or that kind of thing.
And these things that happen, if you read about them on the news or hear about them,
typically 3 o'clock in the morning, in some deserted location, train station, whatever.
So yeah, and people, for the most part, if you're not looking for trouble, you're not going to find it.
Now sometimes it's just some, what people would call just random act that happens wherever in a tourist area or something.
But for the most part, no, we don't have any fear about being in or around New York City.
But the things that you're hearing about, they're real things.
Q. In the time that we've been there, I've only known of two that have come to our church. One of them is there now.
In his case, he was living in Russia, he was drafted to fight in the war, didn't want to fight in the war, and so he made his way to Mexico.
And from Mexico, he ends up in New York City. So he's in the immigration process now, for the most part, no, but there are some.
And like I said, he's not the only guy. I knew of one other guy that confessed to me, that's what he did.
He came across in a truck and made his way to New York after that. So it does happen. Predominantly not, but it does happen.
Anything else?
Q. Is there any other way we could pay for you?
Yeah, two of our adult kids aren't walking closely with the Lord, and so that would be a great thing if that happened.
I want to say thank you to you guys for being here, and we're so excited that God's using me the way that he is, and we're excited to be a part of your ministry.
Would you guys please give him a hand?